Saturday, 28 November 2015

Update: Tinting Epoxy Resin with Powder Paints

In my previous article regarding tinting epoxy, I discussed using laser printer toner powder however,
one commenter on Hackaday mentioned the use of powder paints.

In this rather unscientific update I will show my results...
The powders used are the typical school powder paints which are mixed with water, in this case with epoxy.

Observations:

From observation, the powder texture seems clumpy and chalky. After a bit of Googling it could possible be tempera ?

Sample sticks:

As before, a small amount of the powder was mixed with the epoxy on each of the samples.

The pigments when mixed become quite transparent, orange in particular turns dark red when used liberally.

Taste the rainbow!

Conclusions:

Yellow and blue give a grape colour, rather than green. All the colours seem to give a boiled sweet/hard candy look possibly due to the particle size. Although acceptably smooth, the finish can't beat the particulate size and pigment density of toner powder. The cured hardness was also comparable to toner powder, when fully cured.

Overall it appears to be a cheap and safer alternative to using toner powders.